I’m confused, can anyone help me? Part 5
RT | September 9, 2015
I’m confused about quite a lot of things going on in the world. The West is supposed to be fighting ISIS, yet seems keener on toppling a government which is fighting ISIS. A refugee crisis caused by Western interventions is being used as a pretext for more Western wars.
Elite media commentators keen to stress their humanitarianism, cry ‘something must be done’ about Syria, yet appear not to notice the on-going humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen.
There are violent anti-government protests again in Ukraine, but the reaction from the US is very different to when there were violent anti-government protests in Ukraine eighteen months ago. What on earth is going on? Perhaps you can help me sort out my confusion…
The first thing I’m confused about is the refugee crisis currently affecting Europe.
The vast majority of refugees are coming from countries e.g. Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, which were targeted by the West for ‘regime change’ and which experienced bombing/invasion or destabilization by NATO powers and their regional allies.
We’re told by the West’s political elite and much of the media that in order to stop the influx of refugees to Europe we need to do more bombing.
But if bombing solves the problem of refugees, why are people fleeing from countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya that the West has already bombed?
How can more bombs and intervention solve a problem caused by bombs and intervention? And how can the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria stop ISIS, which doesn’t have an air force?
I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
On the subject of Syria I’m confused about the West’s obsession with toppling President Assad and his government. The secular Syrian government does not and did not threaten the West, and its sworn enemies are the groups- such as Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, which we are supposed to have been fighting ‘a war on terror’ against. If radical Islamist terror groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS are such a danger, why are we still trying to topple a government which has been fighting them? Why does UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne say that the British Parliament’s refusal to support US-led air-strikes on the Syrian government in 2013 was “one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made” when voting ‘Yes’ would have put the RAF on the same side as ISIS – a group which claimed responsibility for the killing of 30 British tourists on a beach in Tunisia earlier this summer? Surely if our leaders really wanted to defeat ISIS, they would be working with countries in the region that have a vested interest in defeating ISIS – like the government in Syria – and not working to overthrow them, which would only help ISIS.
I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
I’m confused about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
It’s the proposed free trade deal between the free, open democracies of Europe, and that bastion of democracy the US, but the deal itself is shrouded in secrecy and can only be read by politicians in a secure reading room in Brussels.
If TTIP is so great- as its supporters claim, why can’t we see its terms and provisions? Why in ‘democratic’ Europe, where our leaders all claim to support public participation in the political process, are we being kept in the dark over a deal which is likely to have a major impact on our daily lives? I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
I’m confused too about events in Yemen, and the lack of concern from Western ’humanitarian interventionists’ over what is happening in the country.
A Saudi-Arabian led alliance has been bombing Yemen since March – yet despite Amnesty International reporting that the bombing campaign has left a “bloody trail of civilian death and destruction paved with evidence of war crimes”- the West‘s “Something Must Be Done” brigade have been strangely silent.
“The civilian population is bearing the brunt of the conflict: a shocking four out of five Yemenis require humanitarian assistance and nearly 1.5 million people are internally displaced,” says Stephen O’Brien, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator.
In Libya in 2011 we had a no-fly zone imposed to prevent massacres that might happen- in Yemen, we’re seeing large scale casualties as a result of airstrikes but this time there’s no calls for NFZs from Western leaders or ‘liberal interventionists’ in the media.
Why was there a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ civilians in Libya in 2011, but not a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ civilians who are being killed in Yemen in 2015?
I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
I’m confused about US policy towards anti-government protests in Ukraine which involve violence from ultra-nationalists.
In early 2014, there were violent protests against the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich, protests in which ultra-nationalists played a prominent role. The US and its allies told the Ukrainian government that it was not allowed to use force against protestors, even though some of them smashed into government buildings and threw Molotov cocktails at police.
“We unequivocally condemn the use of force against civilians by security forces and urge that those forces be withdrawn immediately,” said Secretary of State Kerry.
But last week, when there were fresh anti-government protests involving ultra-nationalists in Kiev which also involved violence, the US’s line was rather different. “Law enforcement agencies need to exercise restraint, but there’s an obligation on the protestors to behave in a peaceful manner”- a State Department spokesman said. Why was there criticism of violent ultra-nationalist protestors in August 2015, but not criticism of violent ultra-nationalist protestors in February 2014? And why was the Ukrainian government given a fierce warning in 2014, but not one this time?
I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
I’m also confused about the continuation of the sanctions war between the US and its allies and Russia. The OSCE report that things are calming down in eastern Ukraine.
Its Special Monitoring Mission report of 5th September said there were “few ceasefire violations in the Donetsk region and none in Lugansk.”
But despite this, the US and Britain are not talking about the easing of sanctions. On the contrary, there have been calls for sanctions to be extended. The economic damage of the sanctions war to EU economies has been put at $100 billion-with 2 million jobs at risk. Surely, seeing how things have calmed down in the Donbass region, and the damage that the sanctions war is doing to Europe, the sensible thing is for the sanctions to be eased or lifted altogether?
Or is there another agenda at work here, that has nothing to do with events in eastern Ukraine and which we’re not being told about?
I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
I’m confused about photographs of dead children and why some seem to affect the Western elites more than others. The photograph of poor little Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee washed up on the shore in Turkey, has been used to drum up support for bombing Syria.
Yet photographs of dead Palestinian children, killed in the Israeli offensive against Gaza last year, brought no such response. On the contrary, this week the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Britain and can expect to receive the red carpet treatment. Among the 539 killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were four children, aged between 9 and 11, who were killed while playing on the beach. Why did their deaths not lead to a political/media campaign for ‘action’ to be taken, as the death of Aylan Kurdi has?
The general public certainly cares: a petition calling for Netanyahu to be arrested for Israeli war crimes when he visits Britain received over 100,000 signatures, meaning that it has to be debated in Parliament. But government minister Eric Pickles dismissed the petition as ‘completely absurd’. Why is it ‘completely absurd’ to care about dead Palestinian children as well as dead Syrian ones?
I’m confused. Can anyone help me?
Monsanto Bites Back
By Don Quijones • WOLF STREET • May 24, 2015
Monsanto, the U.S. agribusiness giant that controls a quarter of the entire global seed market, could soon be even bigger and more powerful than it already is, following renewed speculation over its interest in Swiss agrichemicals firm Syngenta. The logic behind the deal is clear: Monsanto ranks as the world’s largest purveyor of seeds while Swiss-based Syngenta is the world’s largest pesticide and fertilizer company.
A Monsanto-Syngenta tie-up would “deliver substantial synergies that create value for shareholders of both companies”, said Monsanto president and COO, Brett Begemann, adding that cash from these side deals would make an acquisition easier to finance. It would also be the largest-ever acquisition of a European company by a U.S. rival.
The target, Syngenta, seems somewhat less enthusiastic. It is the second time in as many weeks that Monsanto has tabled an unsolicited offer for its Swiss competitor. The first time, on May 8, Syngenta politely but firmly rebuffed Monsanto, saying that the offered price of $45 billion undervalued the company. In response to the latest offer Syngenta said a sell-off of its seeds business would not be enough to allay regulators’ concerns about the tie-up.
The 2 C’s: Consolidation and Concentration
If the deal is consummated, the two companies combined would form a singular agribusiness behemoth that controls a third of both the globe’s seed and pesticides markets, as Mother Jones reports:
To make the deal fly with US antitrust regulators, Syngenta would likely have to sell off its substantial corn and soybean seed business, as well its relatively small glyphosate holdings, in order to avoid direct overlap with Monsanto’s existing market share, the financial website Seeking Alpha reports.
By all measures you would think the global seeds market is already concentrated enough. According to Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher for the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (Grupo ETC), never before in the long history of human agriculture and food have we faced such heightened concentration of power and ownership of the global seed industry, the primary link of the global food chain:
In 2014, just six American and European companies – Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer and Basf – control 100% of the GM seeds planted in the world. All of them were originally chemical manufacturers.
It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, such concentration of the seed industry is a wholly new phenomenon. Thirty-five years ago, there were thousands of seed manufacturers and not a single one of them controlled more than 1% of the global market. Fifteen years later, the top ten companies had captured 30% of the market, yet Monsanto was not among them.
Now Monsanto alone, after having acquired a huge portfolio of seed companies such as Agroceres, Asgrow, Cristiani Burkard, Dekalb, Delta & Pine and the seeds division of Cargill North America, controls 26% of the entire global market of all seeds, not just GMOs. Monsanto, second-placed Dupont, and third-placed Syngenta combined control 53% of the market.
Such concentration of ownership has granted a handful of Western corporations and the governments with which they are inseparably intertwined vast control over one of the world’s primary resources, food. And now Monsanto wants to strengthen that control.
On the Back Foot
The irony is that just weeks ago Monsanto was on the back foot. Facing an unprecedented global consumer backlash, the company decided to roll out a social media and marketing campaign in a bid to win over consumers in key international markets, including China, France, India, Argentina and Brazil.
Here’s more from Reuters:
The “discover Monsanto” campaign encourages consumers to “be part of the conversation,” ask questions and learn about the company’s genetically engineered seeds and its key herbicide products. A corresponding television advertising campaign, underway since November, declares that to Monsanto “food is more than just a meal, it’s love.”
The outreach effort comes as the company’s key products face heightened regulatory scrutiny and a consumer backlash in Monsanto’s top market, the United States. Some U.S. states are mulling mandatory genetically modified labeling laws and advocacy organizations are pressuring regulators to restrict glyphosate use.
Monsanto’s glyphosate-induced headaches began when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a component of the UN’s World Health Organization United Nations, declared that the chemical, one of the active ingredients in Monsanto’s flagship product Roundup, is “probably carcinogenic”. Roundup is the world’s biggest selling weedkiller. According to some estimates, Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds account for as much as half of the corporation’s revenues.
Matters were not helped when Patrick Moore, a high-profile GMO advocate, botched an interview with French media outlet Canal+ in spectacular foot-in-mouth fashion (here’s the link). Moore insisted that Roundup isn’t remotely toxic, arguing that you can “drink a whole quart of it” without it hurting you. However, when invited to put his words to the test by downing a glass of the liquid weed killer, Moore replied that he was not stupid – not once but twice!
The Global Pushback
The fallout has been relentless. The company has been implicated in litigation cases as far away as China, the world’s second largest market for seeds. Even before the scandal, the Chinese government had already begun blocking GMO imports, while Russia has effectively banned all GMO products. In Germany, a number of states have called for a blanket EU-ban on Monsanto’s Roundup.
As for Latin America, one of Monsanto’s fastest growing markets, the rural resistance continues to intensify. As I reported last year in Seed Wars: Latin America Strikes Back Against Monsanto, rural communities are rising up against government legislation that would apply brutally rigid intellectual copyright laws to the crop seeds they are able to grow.
And thanks to the glyphosate scandal governments finally have reason to act. Just yesterday Colombia’s National Drug Council voted to suspend glyphosate spraying on illicit coca cultivations. According to Food & Water Watch, since 2003 Colombia and the US together have spent an estimated $100 million purchasing the chemical from Monsanto for the destruction of coca crops.
In Argentina, one of the world’s largest producers of genetically modified soy bean and corn, 30,000 Argentinean doctors and healthcare professionals signed a letter demanding the prohibition of glyphosate. As the BBC reported last year, in the northern province of Chaco, the minister of Public Health wants an independent commission to investigate cases of cancer and the incidence of children born with disabilities.
Ruthless Resourcefulness
However, even as myriad nations line up to ban Monsanto’s GM products, you can be sure that Monsanto will not take it lying down. As its recent history shows, the company is doggedly persistent. It is also ruthlessly resourceful.
For the moment everything hinges on the success of its hostile takeover of Syngenta. If the deal goes through, the company will expand its influence across myriad new markets. It will also get much closer access to Europe, a market that it had publicly (though certainly not privately) given up on in 2013. By resettling in Switzerland, Monsanto will also be able to significantly reduce its U.S. tax bill as well as hold greater sway over Brussels, which recently authorized 17 new GMOs for food and feed purposes.
According to research by Corporate Europe Observatory, no industry has lobbied the European Commission more fiercely for the passage of the EU-US trade deal (TTIP) than the agribusiness sector, which many rightly fear will open the floodgates to GMOs. In other words, growing public opposition to GMOs may not be enough on its own to stop GMO markets from growing.
As Ulson Gunnar reported in the NEO article Monsanto’s Covert War on European Food Security, Monsanto and friends continue to use covert means to expand their less popular markets, most recently launching GMO operations in war-ravaged Ukraine, which in 2013 was ranked third in global corn production and sixth in wheat production:
With the EU itself relaxing some of its regulations regarding GMOs, likely without the consent of a population increasingly conscious of the risks and actively seeking organic alternatives, biotech conglomerates hope to make GMO products spread from what will be the completely unregulated fields of Ukraine, into Europe and to become as ubiquitous and unavoidable as they are in America.
On Sunday masses of people in hundreds of towns and cities across the world turned out to vent their frustration against a company that has come to symbolize so much that is wrong with today’s world. Meanwhile Monsanto will continue to go about its business, pulling the strings of government and striving to impose its will in the world’s markets and on the world’s people.
Under Shadow of Trade Deal, US Pesticide Lobby Pressured EU to Dump Toxic Pesticide Rules
By Deirdre Fulton | Common Dreams | May 22, 2015
Under pressure from the U.S. and agrochemical industry lobbyists and amid ongoing negotiations for a controversial trade deal, the European Union dropped planned rules that could have led to the banning of 31 pesticides containing hazardous chemicals, a new investigative report has revealed.
The probe, led by the Brussels-based research and watchdog group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and French journalist Stephane Horel, exposes how corporate lobby groups like the American Chemistry Council, CropLife America, and the American Chambers of Commerce, mobilized to stop the EU from taking action on hormone (endocrine) disrupting chemicals (EDCs)—known to have significant health and environmental impacts.
“Hundreds of documents … show unambiguously how science is being manipulated to defend vested interests, manufacture doubt and delay a pioneering regulation.”
—Nina Holland, Corporate Europe Observatory
According to the report—titled A Toxic Affair: How the Chemical Lobby Blocked Action on Hormone Disrupting Chemicals (pdf)—the examination of evidence “sheds light on how corporations and their lobby groups have used numerous tactics from the corporate lobbying playbook: scaremongering, evidence-discrediting, and delaying tactics as well as the ongoing [TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP] negotiations as a leverage.”
Specifically, the Guardian reports: “Draft EU criteria could have banned 31 pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). But these were dumped amid fears of a trade backlash stoked by an aggressive US lobby push.”
The newspaper adds:
On the morning of 2 July 2013, a high-level delegation from the US Mission to Europe and the American Chambers of Commerce (AmCham) visited EU trade officials to insist that the bloc drop its planned criteria for identifying EDCs in favour of a new impact study. By the end of the day, the EU had done so.
The TTIP is a corporate-friendly trade deal, currently being negotiated between the U.S. and the European Union, that is already opposed by environmental, food safety, and labor groups for its lack of transparency, corporate concessions, and negative implications for people and the planet.
Common Dreams has previously reported on efforts by pesticide lobby groups to use ongoing trade negotiations to align regulatory standards by lowering them to U.S. levels rather than increasing them to the stronger safeguards in the E.U.
The new revelations only add fuel to the fire.
“This is yet further evidence that the European Commission is more than willing to trade off, weaken, or delay much needed regulation and protections for the sake of completing this TTIP trade deal,” Samuel Lowe, of Friends of the Earth, told The Independent.
“This investigation tells the story of a major ongoing lobbying battle,” added Nina Holland, CEO campaigner and co-author of the Toxic Affair report. “Hundreds of documents released by the European Commission following freedom of information requests show unambiguously how science is being manipulated to defend vested interests, manufacture doubt and delay a pioneering regulation.”
Obama Fights to Spread GMO Foods Throughout Europe
By Eric Zuesse | Black Agenda Report | April 29, 2015
One of the major barriers blocking U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign for his mammoth international trade deals — the TTIP with Europe, and the TPP with Asia — is: other countries want the freedom to make up their own minds about the safety or dangerousness of the foods they allow to be sold within their borders.
The Obama Administration insists that no nation has that freedom. In fact, all participating nations would be removed from that responsibility and authority. The Obama trade deals propose to replace that national authority, and basic national sovereignty on these important matters, by decisions that would instead be made by international panels, whose members will be appointed by international corporations, which have their own profits at stake in these matters. Consumers and others will be ignored: they will not be represented in the proposed panels. Nor will any government be represented there. That soverignty will instead be transferred to the billionaire families who control and derive their income from these corporations.
On Friday, April 24th, Agence France Presse headlined “US Stresses Opposition to EU Opt-Out for GMO Imports,” and reported that, “The United States underscored Friday its opposition to a new European Union plan to allow member states to block genetically engineered imports after bilateral talks on a transatlantic free-trade pact.”
President Obama’s Trade Representative, Michael Froman, who is a Wall Street banker and a longtime close personal friend of the President, said on April 22nd that he was “very disappointed” that the EU wants to allow individual EU nations to “opt out” of automatic approval of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) that the international panels will approve to be marketed everywhere. Furthermore, Froman’s assistant said that the U.S. rejects “a proposal to allow EU member states to ban products deemed safe by Europe’s own scientists.” He was referring there to the half of scientific papers that find GMO foods to be safe. However, those papers were produced by companies that manufacture and market GMOs. The other half of the scientific papers on GMOs, the half that were produced independently of the GMO industry, have not found GMO foods to be safe — to the exact contrary. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative ignores those papers.
On 8 July 2009, Agence France Presse headlined “Scientists Warn of Hazards of GMOs,” and reported that an article in the International Journal of Biological Science co-authored by world-leading scientists, reported that, “Agricultural GM companies and evaluation committees systematically overlook the side effects of GMOs and pesticides.” An accompanying study, “How Subchronic and Chronic Health Effects Can Be Neglected for GMOs, Pesticides or Chemicals,” found “a significant underestimation of the initial signs of diseases like cancer and diseases of the hormonal, immune, nervous and reproductive systems.”
The United States does not regulate GMO foods, because the patents are owned mostly by U.S. companies, and the U.S. Government doesn’t want to get in the way of their selling their patented products. Consequently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration takes any given GMO manufacturer’s word for the safety of its GMO products. U.S. President Obama wants to promote U.S. trade by convincing all other countries to sell GMO foods. His TTIP and TPP are supported by the GMO industry, which has approved their GMO foods and allowed their product-labels to not mention that some or all of the ingredients are genetically modified crops.
One of the major advantages of GMO crops is that they can survive the use of herbicides — weed-killers — that kill natural crops. (The GMO-seed manufacturer also markets the pesticide or herbicide; these are chemical companies, and GMOs are a complementary or synergistic product-line for them. For example, the leading herbicide “Roundup” is from Monsanto which produces the GMO seeds that tolerate it.) Another advantage is that the foods can stay longer as looking and smelling fresh, which also lowers the cost of production, and yet the consumer doesn’t even know that the food is actually stale — the food is competing against costlier-to-produce non-GMO foods and so driving them off the market by the lower price, which leaves more and more food-production dependent upon GMO makers such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical. The lower price is obvious; the lower quality is hidden. It’s race-to-the-bottom international ‘competition,’ in which the aristocracy reap all the winnings; the public get the losses.
A recent news report from independent food scientists was bannered “FDA Product Safety Declaration Misleads Nation—Again” and it contains references to many recent scientific papers that find GMO foods to be dangerous, and harmful to human health.
An international analysis, “A Comparative Evaluation of the Regulation of GM Crops” was published in 2013 in the scientific journal Environment International, and it concluded by saying that, “Regulatory bodies are not adequately assessing the risks of dsRNA-producing GM products. As a result, we recommend a process to properly assess the safety of dsRNA-producing GM organisms before they are released or commercialized.” The Obama Administration is trying to prevent that from happening; and their proposed TTIP and TPP international-trade treaties are crucial components of achieving this objective. In the United States, GMO-producers are granted the right to self-regulate, and this practice will become the standard worldwide practice if the TPP and TTIP become passed into law.
The U.S. Government is doing everything it can to spread to other nations the same deregulatory policies that American companies rely upon to market their products inside the United States. On Friday, April 25th, a key U.S. Senate Committee approved a “Trade Promotion Authority” bill to help rush through the U.S. Senate the approval of Mr. Froman’s TPP trade deal with Asian countries. For a summary of the regulatory practices around the world regarding GMO crops, see here. A discussion of the votes in the U.S. Senate on the measure that was proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders to allow individual states to establish their own regulations requiring the labeling or indication of whether or not particular food ingredients are GMOs (since the federal Government refuses to consider such a proposal), is here, and it shows that even some allegedly progressive U.S. Senators voted the GMO industry’s way on that bill to regulate it, which failed, on a vote of 71 to 27. One might call this the Monsanto Congress, because the U.S. House is even more conservative than the Senate. Of the 27 U.S. Senators who voted for the Sanders bill, 24 were Democrats, 2 were Independents, and 1 was Republican. 43 Republicans, and 28 Democrats voted against it. The Obama Administration had lobbied against the bill, in order to continue the GMO industry’s free reign over America’s food-supply.
When Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency in 2008, he said, “Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.” But as soon as he won the Presidency “The new president filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA.” And whereas Republican news-organizations such as Fox ‘News’ criticized him as being a Muslim Marxist, he was actually implementing policies that continued those of the Republican George W. Bush Administration on this and on many other issues. Yet, no matter how far to the right Mr. Obama actually was, he was portrayed as a ‘leftist’ in Republican ’news’ media. And yet, still, even today, the vast majority of Democratic voters approve of his actions as President. They still believe his rhetoric, even though he has lied to them constantly and even filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that lying in politics must continue to remain unrestricted not only at the national level but also in each and every one of the states. Consequently, in the United States, there is no effective political opposition to the large international U.S. corporations. (And, under the Republican Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, corporations now have virtually unlimited freedom to use stockholders’ money to purchase politicians.)
Hillary Clinton is a big supporter of the GMO industry, and the response of liberals to that is to ask her to give them rhetoric they like on the matter, just as Obama had done when he was running for President in 2008. In other words: they will campaign for her to become President if she will only lie to them as Obama did to them. What liberals are demanding is rhetoric; but if they get it from her, then the industries that are funding her Presidential campaign won’t be worried, because she has a solid record of doing what her financial backers want her to do. As long as Americans don’t care when a politician has lied to them, lying to them will continue to be the way to win public office — especially considering that America’s international corporations now have been granted by the Republican U.S. Supreme Court a ‘free speech’ right to purchase the U.S. Government. And now that the Supreme Court has also ruled that political lies are a Constitutionally protected form of speech, those ads don’t even need to be true. If the American people don’t care about honesty, then they won’t have an honest government, because America’s corporations can then buy any U.S. Government they want — they’ll have total impunity if the U.S. public don’t even care about honesty in their government. There are no legal penalties for political lying; so, if there are also no political penalties for it, then the U.S. can only be ruled by lies and their liars. Should that be called “fascism”?
According to the generally progressive Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (who, along with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is one of the Senate’s three leading opponents of Mr. Obama’s proposed international-trade treaties), President Obama has been lobbying Senators more insistently and more intensely on getting them to grant him “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority” to ram these treaties through, than on any other single issue since Obama first became President in 2009. No issue, not even Obamacare nor any other, has been as important to Obama as is his getting signed into law the TPP and TTIP. It would certainly be the culmination of his Presidency if he succeeds. It would be his crowning achievement. He and his heirs will be amply rewarded if he succeeds; and that’s apparently what he really cares about. He has shown it by his actions as President, not by his rhetoric to voters. After all: Americans, it seems, don’t really care about honesty. All they really care about is rhetoric that pleases them. They merely want to be told what they want to hear.
Perhaps this is the reason why no progressive has entered the Democratic Presidential contest against Hillary Clinton. If the only realistic possibilities to become the next President are her and her Republican opponent (whomever he will turn out to be), then America will continue to be a de facto one-party State, and this will be the U.S. international-corporate party, in both of its factions or nominal varieties, controlling the U.S. Government. The only comprehensive scientific study that has yet been done finds that the U.S. has, in fact, already been ruled in this way for some time. (The history of how it came to be this way, starting gradually after the end of World War II, is the subject of my latest book.) Obama is merely implementing it more; he didn’t start it. He is implementing it more than even Republicans were able to do.
Obama wouldn’t have been able to do this if he didn’t come bearing the label ‘Democrat.’ And Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill was the key person to subordinate that Party to Wall Street. Hillary and Obama are following in his footsteps. Obama’s “Change” occurred actually when Bill Clinton became President in 1993. It simply hasn’t been much recognized until now. Today’s Democratic Party started when Bill became President. That’s when the one-party State, with the national Democrats playing the role of the ‘Good Cop’ to the national and local Republicans’ role of the ‘Bad Cop,’ in the eyes of the Democratic Party’s electoral base of deceived liberals, actually began to take over the U.S. Government, for the benefit of, and service to, America’s aristocracy.
This is why both Obama and Clinton are big supporters of essentially unregulated GMOs. It’s sort of like unregulated Wall Street: the profits get privatized, while the losses (poor health etc.) get socialized.
Fast Track Bill Would Legitimize White House Secrecy and Clear the Way for Anti-User Trade Deals
By Jeremy Malcolm and Maira Sutton | EFF | April 16, 2015
Following months of protest, Congress has finally put forth bicameral Fast Track legislation today to rush trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) through Congress. Sens. Orrin Hatch and Ron Wyden, and Rep. Paul Ryan, respectively, introduced the bill titled the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015. With Fast Track, lawmakers will be shirking their constitutional authority over trade policy, letting the White House and the U.S. Trade Representative pass Internet rules in back room meetings with corporate industry groups. If this passes, lawmakers would only have a small window of time to conduct hearings over trade provisions and give a yea-or-nay vote on ratification of the agreement without any ability to amend it before they bind the United States to its terms.
The Fast Track bill contains some minor procedural improvements from the version of the bill introduced last year. However, these fixes will do little to nothing to address the threats of restrictive digital regulations on users rights in the TPP or TTIP. The biggest of these changes is language that would create a new position of Chief Transparency Officer that would supposedly have the authority to “consult with Congress on transparency policy, coordinate transparency in trade negotiations, engage and assist the public, and advise the United States Trade Representative on transparency policy.”
However, given the strict rules of confidentiality of existing, almost completed trade deals and those outlined in the Fast Track bill itself, we have no reason to believe that this officer would have much power to do anything meaningful to improve trade transparency, such as releasing the text of the agreement to the public prior to the completion of negotiations. As it stands, the text only has to be released to the public 60 days before it is signed, at which time the text is already locked down from any further amendments.
There is also a new “consultation and compliance” procedure, about which Public Citizen writes [pdf]:
The bill’s only new feature in this respect is a new “consultation and compliance” procedure that would only be usable after an agreement was already signed and entered into, at which point changes to the pact could be made only if all other negotiating parties agreed to reopen negotiations and then agreed to the changes (likely after extracting further concessions from the United States). That process would require approval by 60 Senators to take a pact off of Fast Track consideration, even though a simple majority “no” vote in the Senate would have the same effect on an agreement.
Thus, essentially the Fast Track bill does the same as it ever did—tying the hands of Congress so that it is unable to give meaningful input into the agreement during its drafting, or to thoroughly review the agreement once it is completed.
A main feature of the bill is its negotiation objectives, which set the parameters within which the President is authorized to negotiate the agreement. If Congress considers that the text ultimately deviates from these objectives, it can vote the agreement down. Some of these negotiation objectives have been added or changed since the previous Fast Track bill, but none of these provide any comfort to us on the troubling issues from the Intellectual Property, E-Commerce, and Investment chapters of the TPP. Indeed, some of the new text raise concerns. For example:
- Governments are to “refrain from implementing trade-related measures that impede digital trade in goods and services, restrict cross-border data flows, or require local storage or processing of data”. Data flows and the location of the processing of data aren’t solely or even primarily trade issues; they are human rights issues that can affect privacy, free expression and more. The discussion about whether laws that require local storage and processing of certain kinds of sensitive personal data are protective of user rights, for instance, cannot take place in the secret enclaves of a trade negotiation. The bill does allow for exceptions as required to further “legitimate policy objectives”, but only where these “are the least restrictive on trade” and “promote an open market environment”.
- Trade secrets collected by governments are to be protected against disclosure except in “exceptional circumstances to protect the public, or where such information is effectively protected against unfair competition”. But there are other cases in which there may be an important public interest in the disclosure of such trade secrets, such as where they reveal past misdeeds, or throw transparency onto the activities of corporations executing public functions.
But more troubling than what has been included in the negotiating objectives, is what has been excluded. There is literally nothing to require balance in copyright, such as the fair use right. On the contrary; if a country’s adoption of a fair use style right causes loss to a foreign investor, it could even be challenged as a breach of the agreement, under the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions. Further, the “Intellectual Property” section of today’s bill is virtually identical to the version introduced in 2002, and what minor changes there are do not change the previous text’s evident antipathy for fair use. So while the new bill has added, as an objective, “to ensure that trade agreements foster innovation and promote access to medicines,” an unchanged objective is “providing strong enforcement of intellectual property rights.” What happens if those two objectives are in conflict? For example, in many industries, thin copyright and patent restrictions have proven to be more conducive to innovation than the thick, “strong” measures the bill requires. Some of our most innovative industries have been built on fair use and other exceptions to copyright—and that’s even more obvious now than it was in 2002. The unchanged language suggests the underlying assumption of the drafters is that more IP restrictions mean more innovation and access, and that’s an assumption that’s plainly false.
All in all, we do not see anything in this bill that would truly remedy the secretive, undemocratic process of trade agreements. Therefore, EFF stands alongside the huge coalition public interest groups, professors, lawmakers, and individuals who are opposed to Fast Track legislation that would legitimize the White House’s corporate-captured, backroom trade negotiations. The Fast Track bill will likely come to a vote by next week—and stopping it is one sure-fire way to block the passage of these secret, anti-user deals.
If you’re on Twitter, help us call on influential members of Congress to come out against this bill.
Additional Resources:
Read the text of the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 here.
Read about all of our concerns with the TPP agreement:
- Anti-Circumvention of Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- Criminalization of Investigative Journalism, Security Research, and Whistleblowing
- ISP Liability: Internet Intermediaries as Copyright Cops
- Criminal Copyright Enforcement
- Expansion of Copyright Terms
- “Investor-State” Provisions Could Undermine User Protections in Copyright
- Restrictions on Fair Use
NATO invents Russian threats in the Baltic
By Oliver Tickel | The Ecologist | February 19, 2015
Russian President Vladimir Putin will “launch a campaign of undercover attacks to destabilise the Baltic states on Nato’s eastern flank”, the Telegraph reports today – along with all other mainstream news media.
How do we know this? Because the UK’s Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said so. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia watch out – the Russian peril is fast coming your way.
“There are lots of worries”, Fallon told the newspaper. “I’m worried about Putin. There’s no effective control of the border, I’m worried about his pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing NATO, the submarines and aircraft … They are modernising their conventional forces, they are modernising their nuclear forces and they are testing NATO, so we need to respond.”
Covert attack by Russia on the Baltic states is “a very real and present danger”, Fallon insisted. Now where did we hear that before? Ah yes. On 16th December 1998 President Bill Clinton said that that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein presented “a clear and present danger” to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere.
We all know where that led: the Iraq war followed a few years later. We also know that the claim was a monstrous untruth: Saddam had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. So why should we believe Fallon now? Where is his evidence? He has none. When you already know the truth, who needs evidence?
Fallon – and NATO – should keep their eyes on the ball
But while Fallon’s attention is focused on the imaginary threat to the Baltic states, there is another country that really could be ‘at risk’ – and not because of cyber-attack, invasion by ‘green men’ or a campaign of destabilisation emanating from the Kremlin.
No, the EU, the European Central Bank, the IMF and European finance ministers have already been doing all the destabilisation that’s needed – forcing Greece into a deep programme of austerity that has seen the economy shrink by 25% over five years, the closure of vital public services, mass unemployment and the forced sell-off of public assets.
And now the Greeks – and their newly elected Syriza government – have had enough. This week the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras flatly refused to renew the €240 billion ‘bailout’ package, which comes with all the austerity strings, and he today advanced proposals for a ‘six-month assistance package’ free of harsh conditions to give Greece time to renegotiate its debt.
The standoff continues, and will be decided tomorrow by EU finance ministers. It’s not looking good: Germany has already stated that the Greek proposal “does not meet the conditions”. But if the finance minsters don’t agree, then what?
You guessed it: Tsipras will turn to Russia. Earlier this month Tsipras and Putin agreed on a range of bilateral ties, including the construction of a pipeline that would carry Russian natural gas from the Turkish border across Greece to the other countries of southern Europe.
This follows the re-routing of the ‘South Stream’ pipeline, which had been due to cross Bulgaria but was effectively blocked by the EU’s retrospective application of energy market rules, under heavy pressure from the USA. Last November and December Putin negotiated the pipeline’s realignment across Turkey with Turkish President Erdogan – right up to the Greek border.
Following the agreement between Putin and Tsipras, which came complete with an invitation to Moscow on Victory over the Nazis day, 9th May, the pipeline link to the major countries of southern Europe is now complete, at least on paper. And once it’s built, Greece will effectively control – and profit from – that gas supply, and take a strategic position in Europe’s energy landscape.
But Greece is a NATO member!
Greece’s increasingly warm relationship with Russia is already causing concern among other EU and NATO countries. German Defense Minister Ursula von Der Leyen has said that Greece was “putting at risk its position in the NATO alliance with its approach to Russia.”
This provoked a fierce retort from Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos who branded the attack as “unacceptable and extortionate” – noting that “Greece was always on the side of the Allies when they pushed back German occupation troops.”
“Statements that replace the EU and NATO’s institutional bodies are unacceptable as blackmailing”, he added. “They undermine the European institutions except if Germany’s aim is to dissolve the European Union and the NATO.”
So if Tsipras’s refinancing proposal is refused tomorrow will Greece quit NATO and the EU, to join the Eurasian Union? Not if Mr Putin gets his way: Greece is worth much more to Russia as an ally within the EU and NATO than outside – where it can veto more trade sanctions against Russia, block the TTIP and CETA trade deals with the USA and Canada, and oppose NATO’s increasing belligerence from within.
But we could see Greece simply renouncing its manifestly unpayable and unjust €320 billion national debt, and quitting the Eurozone straitjacket – while receiving an emergency liquidity package from Russia to support the launch of the New Drachma.
In fact, we could see a re-run of important elements of the Ukraine play of December 2013, when Russia offered a support package under which it would buy $15 billion in bonds from Ukraine, supporting its collapsing currency, and supply it with deeply discounted gas – £268 per cubic metre rather than the maarket price of $400.
A $15 billion purchase of New Drachma denominated Greek bonds would be a superb launch for Greece’s new currency, and would firmly cement Greece’s long term alliance with Russia, providing it with a valuable long term bridgehead into both the EU and NATO.
This move would also give inspiration and confidence to progressive political movements across Europe that take inspiration from Syriza’s fight for economic justice – in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, the UK and beyond – and bear the powerful message: there is an alternative.
And while NATO, the EU, the USA and their loyal servants, among them the UK’s Michael Fallon, deliberately whip up a fictitious threat in the Baltic, ignoring the real danger they face to the south, the masterly Mr Putin would once again make fools of them all.
Syriza-led Greek parliament ‘will never ratify TTIP’
At an anti-TTIP demonstration in Berlin last month. (Photo: Uwe Hiksch/flickr/cc)
By Sarantis Michalopoulos | EurActiv | February 2, 2015
The newly-elected government in Athens has always been suspicious of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and will use its Parliament majority to sink the EU-US trade pact, claims a former Syriza MEP now turned minister.
After making its voice heard in the debate over sanctions on Russia, the new government in Athens is now making its opposition known to the EU-US trade deal, TTIP.
Georgios Katrougkalos, a former influential Syriza MEP who quit his European Parliament seat to become deputy minister for administrative reform in the leftist Greek government, said the new leadership in Athens will use its veto to kill the proposed trade pact – at least in its current form.
Just before the January elections, he told EurActiv Greece that a Syriza-dominated Greek parliament would never ratify the EU-USA trade deal.
Asked by EurActiv Greece whether the promise still holds now Syriza is in power, Katrougkalos replied:
“I can ensure you that a Parliament where Syriza holds the majority will never ratify the deal. And this will be a big gift not only to the Greek people but to all the European people”.
Double veto power
The leftist Syriza party may not have an absolute majority in Parliament but its junior coalition partner seems to share the same views on the EU-US trade pact.
Syriza, which won a stunning victory at snap elections a week ago (25 January) formed a coalition with the right-wing anti-austerity Independent Greeks party, which is intent on opposing laws seen as too favourable to big business.
The coalition agreement gives the new Greek leadership an effective veto power over TTIP and other deals submitted to Parliament ratification.
Indeed, once the pact is negotiated – a process which may still take over a year –, it will be submitted for a unanimous vote in the European Council, where each of the 28 EU national governments are represented.
This means that one country can use its veto power to influence the negotiations or block the trade deal as a whole, an opportunity Syriza will no doubt use.
And even if the pact makes it past this first stage, it will then be submitted to ratification by all parliaments of the 28 EU Member States, offering opponents a second opportunity to wield a veto.
Welfare state under threat
Like many other leftists and social democrats in Europe, Katrougkalos raised serious concerns about the Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism, or ISDS, contained in the pact.
The mechanism is designed to protect companies’ foreign investments against harmful or illegal rulings in the countries where they operate. It gives them the chance to take legal action against a state whose legislation negatively impacts their economic activity.
Katrougkalos underlined the uncertainty surrounding the ISDS negotiations, saying the European Commission’s precise mandate was unclear.
“An undemocratic practice of lack of transparency has prevailed from the very beginning of the negotiations,” he claimed.
The newly-appointed minister understands that TTIP’s objective was not to reduce tariffs, which are already “very low” but to make an adjustment to the rules governing other sectors. “It contributes to the elimination of some bureaucratic procedures on exports, helping this way the economic efficiency,” he said.
But he made clear that the danger lies in the fact that in most economic fields the regulatory rules are different in the EU and the US. For him, multinational companies stand to benefit the most from lower regulatory barriers, citing banks and brokerage firms, which are subject to weaker supervision in America than in Europe.
“For example we [the EU] don’t permit GMOs, data protection is significantly more important as well as the protection of national health systems,” he said, adding that any consolidation in these rules “will undermine the way the welfare state is organised in the EU.”
Independent Greeks take the same line
Meanwhile, Syriza’s coalition partner, the right-wing anti-austerity Independent Greeks party, takes a similar stance against TTIP.
In a statement issued on 4 November 2014, the then-opposition party said the deal will not live up to its promise of relaunching economic activity.
“It is supposed to be an agreement that will boost the real economy, but its main supporters are international bankers and lobbies,” emphasised Marina Chrysoveloni, a spokesperson for Independent Greeks.
“In simple words, the speculative capital will have even more freedom to move […] in a huge single market with eight hundred million people,” she concluded.
On Syriza’s side, Katrougkalos admitted there was uncertainty about how the talks will conclude but said he was confident that the trade pact “will be approved by the European Parliament”.
“The social democrats have objections on ISDS [investor-state dispute settlement] mechanism but it seems they accept the trade deal’s logic,” Katrougkalos said. In his view, the centre-right European People’s Party and the Liberal ALDE “have a safe majority in Parliament”.
Read:
Street Demonstrations In 21 European Countries Held To Protest Against TAFTA/TTIP; Another ACTA Revolt Brewing?
By Glyn Moody | Techdirt | October 15, 2014
Last month, the European Commission refused to accept a request to allow an official EU-wide petition called a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) to take place. This was a curiously maladroit move by the Commission: it would have been easy to allow the petition against TAFTA/TTIP and CETA to proceed, thank the organizers once it was completed, file it away somewhere and then ignore it. Instead, by refusing to allow it to take place, the European Commission has highlighted in a dramatic manner the deeply undemocratic way in which so-called trade agreements are conducted.
Moreover, those making the request have simply gone ahead anyway, launching what they call the “Self-organised European Citizens’ initiative Against TTIP and CETA“. Even though this was only launched last week, it has already collected over 600,000 signatures from European citizens at the time of writing, and there is every indication that it will go well past the nominal one million signatures that the ECI would have required. The European Commission’s refusal to allow the official petition was doubly stupid, since it came shortly before a Europe-wide day of action against TAFTA/TTIP that took place last Saturday, and doubtless encouraged people to take to the streets in order to make their views felt:
On October 11, 2014, tens of thousands of people and hundreds of organisations in 21 countries are organising actions to reclaim democracy, and stop the negotiations on three far-reaching trade agreements: the EU-US deal (TTIP), the EU-Canada deal (CETA) and the trade in services deal (TiSA).
This decentralised European Day of Action — consisting of over 300 actions, marches, meetings and flash mobs — is being organised by an unprecedented alliance of civil society groups and individuals, social movements, trade unions, rights defenders, farmers and grassroots activist groups.
Reporting on the event, Euractiv.com wrote:
Some 400 activist groups marched all over Europe on Saturday (11 October) in protest against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), as the EU-US trade deal crystallises opposition to a wide variety of issues — from shale gas to corporate finance.
That last point is important. Euractiv.com goes on to explain:
The opposition to TTIP has many faces however, and seems to embody a wide variety of concerns. In France, many small demonstrations focused on opposition to shale gas, especially in the South of France, while in Berlin protesters were worried that TTIP would weaken the powers of the German regions, or Länders.
Potentially, that could make the European opposition to TAFTA/TTIP even broader-based than it was to ACTA, where people were largely concerned about a single issue — digital rights. And just as the ACTA demonstrations started off small scale, but grew to hundreds of thousands of people before ACTA was rejected by the European Parliament, so the anti-TTIP movement in Europe could easily swell larger still. Especially if the European Commission continues to conduct the negotiations in secret and without any input from its citizens.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
PhRMA Wants US To Use TAFTA/TTIP To Stop EU Releasing Basic Drug Safety Information
By Glyn Moody | Techdirt | July 3, 2014
Back in February, we reported that PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, was pushing to have the EU put on the US’s ‘Priority Watch List’ for its plans to disclose basic safety information about drugs. Now a letter from PhRMA obtained by the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel shows that US pharmaceutical companies are trying to use TAFTA/TTIP to undermine the new EU rules on making clinical trial data available (original in German):
A letter from the U.S. pharmaceutical association (PhRMA) to the TTIP chief negotiator for the United States, Douglas Bell, states: “The disclosure of confidential data from clinical and pre-clinical study files and patient data puts at risk the health system and the well-being of patients.” Why more transparency should harm the health systems, the lobby group doesn’t explain, but it makes clear to the negotiator how he should conduct the negotiations with the EU: the publication of commercially-sensitive data from a market authorization, the PhRMA letter said threateningly, is not only contrary to the rules of the American FDA, but also to the internationally-accepted intellectual property rights of the World Trade Organization, the so-called TRIPS Agreement. “PhRMA and its members call on the U.S. government to influence the EU at all levels in order to eliminate this problem.”
It’s hard to see how the problem can be “eliminated.” Back in April, the European Parliament adopted the Clinical Trials Regulation by a huge majority. Effective from 2016, it states that information from clinical study files “should not generally be considered commercially confidential” and must be made publicly available — exactly what PhRMA is lobbying against.
What’s worrying is that there’s already been one attempt to water down these requirements. Der Tagesspiegel suggests this may have been as a result of pressure from the European Commission, concerned about US reaction to them. It will be interesting to see how the Commission reconciles any US demands during the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations to remove the requirement to publish drug safety information with the new EU regulation that requires it.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
EU vote: Freight train of opposition
By Brett Redmayne-Titley | Press TV | May 31, 2014
While EU leaders and their Washington sympathizers marginalize, rationalize, and excuse away Sunday’s historic European Union parliamentary election results, they deliberately avoid the greater point of concern. The people are coming.
French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, called the sudden increase in new opposition Members of the European Parliament ( MEP) an, “earthquake.” He, too, missed the correct metaphore. This staggering election result is a freight train. More passengers are climbing aboard daily. Destination: Capital City.
On Sunday, May 25, 2014, recently formed national opposition parties scared the status quo to the marrow. In Greece, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland pro-nationalist parties gave, for the first time, a viable, potentially foundation changing political presence to their disenfranchised countrymen. Many of these opposition parties have sharply divergent philosophies. In values these parties are not a coherent group. Some have established track records in their governments and some are fringe parties, even devoutly neo-fascist.
Regardless of their philosophy these parties share a similar agenda. As Pepe Escobar wrote in a piece for Russia Today:
“What matters to the average citizen is… How to deal with immigration; how to fight the eradication of the welfare state; the implications of the free trade agreement with the US (TTIP); the value of the euro – and what the ECB Mafia is actually doing to fight unemployment.”
Fed up with being ignored by their governments and with the daily unhealthy reminders of the “benefits” of EU austerity measures, the public well knows the decisions made in Brussels benefit only the top 1%. Established EU voting power in the parliament will now face an opposition that is making its presence shown as they already have in their homelands.
Shocking the EU old-guard, the damage to established politics in Brussels summed up as; UK Independence party- UKIP (27.5%/ 19 seats); Front National/ France (25%/ 24 seats); Syriza Party/Greece (26.5%/ 8 seats); Alternative fur Deutschland/ Germany (7%/6 seats); . Danish People’s Party/ Denmark (26.7%/seats ).
The big surprises were, the Sweden Democrats (9.7%/ 1 seat); the Congress of the New Right/Poland (7.1%/4 seats); the Golden Dawn Party/ Greece (9.4%/ 5 seats) and Spain’s Podemos that formed just this past March 2014(8%/ 5 seats).
Far worse for EU national leaders, UKIP, Danish People’s Party, Front National, and the specifically anti-austerity Syriza Party all came in first place in their nations’ EU ballot boxes.
David Cameron, showing his keen grasp of the obvious, looked pale while muttering his blasé synopsis of Sunday’s disaster:
“People are deeply disillusioned with the European Union. The EU needs to change; it can’t be business as usual.”
Indeed.
Writing in, Open Europe, Mats Perrson had a more accurate take on Sunday’s election.
“The temptations in Brussels will be to view this as the peak of anti-EU sentiment. This would be a huge gamble. These elections are a clear warning: offer voters a polarized choice between more Europe and no Europe and sooner or later they will choose the latter.”
The “latter” is likely to be shown in several upcoming national elections. The existing EU leaders have never shown a foundation in populist thought, therefore commanding austerity for all. Except themselves. The chance that the EU will voluntarily shift from pure US backed capitalist thought and return to a preferred socialist model is zero. The will of the people is bad for “business as usual.”
Cameron had good reason to look pale. Despite his Conservative Party losing six seats and the lapdog, supposedly opposition Labor Party losing ten of their eleven seats, the new populist freight train is now bearing down on him from two more directions — Scotland and UKIP.
The Scottish independence referendum is set for September 18, 2014, and thanks to their party’s affable, answer-for-everything leader, Alex Salmond, chances of victory are getting closer to 50-50 everyday. This scares Westminster to the core of their elitist souls. Sunday’s vote will only embolden UK fence-sitters who have, thanks to the persistent Salmond, a lot of good reasons to rid themselves of the sinking UK ship.
Cameron’s nemesis is Nigel Farage and his brash take-no-prisoners UKIP party. The devastation of EU austerity policies is obvious in every corner of the UK except the power center of London. With a completely ethnocentric, UK first agenda UKIP has many reasons to be popular. Before the EU election UKIP was already surging in preparation for the upcoming national election.
“The most extraordinary political event in the past 100 years,” crowed Farage with that mocking grin that has so endeared him to his parliamentary adversaries. Well, maybe not. But UKIP was the first political party other than the Tories and Labor to win a national election in over one hundred years. With the UK national election of May 17, 2015 next in UKIP’s headlights, social conditions worsening, and privatization buying up the country, including the beloved Royal Mail, Sunday may be a timely precursor to a pending historic moment. For Mr. Salmond, the surging opposition support across the EU is very good press indeed.
Speaking in France, Francois Hollande looked to be in shock. Despite his approval ratings plummeting, austerity measures increasing, and growing unemployment, all thanks to a shrinking GDP, Hollande has strangely developed a penchant for multiple expensive wars in central Africa. Like his Washington war partners, his French public can be damned, but he always has more money for war.
All this from a socialist?
Hence, Marine Le Pen’s Front National scored a clear first place victory with almost 25% of the French vote. The Front National has a long history in France but has only come to prominence, by necessity, in recent years. Small wonder that Front National had rendered Hollande virtually speechless. The light bulb had suddenly gone on. He’s done.
Across Europe every one of these suddenly relevant political parties are the new subject of passionate conversation. The uninformed are asking, the informed are growing, and the accelerating freight train of opposition is stopping to add new cars for more passengers, more and more often. With the EU governments currently in denial, the repeatedly discredited press unable to spin this disaster into victory, and Ukraine reminding everyone daily of the horrors of EU democracy, conditions for these opposition leaders are very favorable.
Of course, across the pond Washington was also in denial. Writing for the “respected” Brookings Institute, Douglas J. Elliott, as a true American, was of course blind to the value of growing opposition via democracy. Offering of a synopsis he summed up, “Protest parties critical to the status quo did very well,… but not well enough to upset the fundamental balance of power in Brussels.” He added, “The French and UK governments were weakened a bit. Most other governments avoided serious new problems.”
Really? Likely Farage, Le Pen, and Salmond would enjoy a hearty laugh responding to Mr. Elliott. They will not have to. Their parties will in upcoming national elections.
Sweden is first up. With the Feminist Initiative and Sweden Democrats having taken their first ever European Parliament seats by offering very pro-Austria, nationalist opposition agendas, the National election of Sept, 14, 2014, will be a litmus test for the following May.
May 7, 2015, could see a truly historic change in UK politics. In the national election it will be UKIP versus those other two parties. Regardless of the outcome UKIP will pick up more Members of Parliament and at the very least be a very powerful force in the many coalitions the UK government functions as. Mr. Farage already has reason to grin from ear-to-ear. A year from now?
Greece has the potential to rock the world to the core on June 16, 2016. With Syriza serving notice on Sunday and even the vile agendas of Golden Dawn getting votes enough to be members of the European Parliament, two years hence they may take over power. Greece is the laboratory setting for exposing every possible horrifying social condition of EU austerity which continues to get worse. Both parties blame the EU and want to have Greece opt-out. In the summer of ’16 this is now a very distinct possibility. If Greece was to leave the EU it would set a disastrous precedent since already UKIP is calling for a national referendum on doing just that. If London leaves the EU the Euro is done.
The EU citizens are not so easily put down. Unlike the completely bought-and-paid-for US government and court system voter manipulation via money has not yet had the same controlling effect on voters and elections. As with America, it is the established political parties that are the bar to actual democracy. National opposition parties began to cure this on Sunday.
Democracy in the EU still has a chance. Sunday’s vote proves this. In America there is no viable third party for socially impoverished Americans to attach themselves to in order to get some, any, representation. The Golden Dawn party now sitting at the EU table, despite its similarities to the American tea party, would never be allowed a seat in the U.S. Congress.
Mr. Elliott, like the rest of the established elite, miss the greater point of the EU vote. While the freight train of opposition loads more passengers in preparation for huffing and puffing into Brussels, it will pick up even more passengers before making one more stop. Washington DC.
Previously across a disadvantaged developing world democracy is pro-American, or it is terrorist and therefore brutalized.
The “Empire”, i.e., America and its Zionist puppet masters must have EU support to survive. Too far afield to effectively conquer the world by itself, so far EU leaders have been the support troops for the American conquest of Ukraine. Come the next national elections throwing ever more precious national coffers at America’s feet will be a subject of great campaign controversy. This will slow the “empire” at the very least.
An impoverished Europe knows that there is no money left for war and that the wars are not in their countries’ true national interests. As these many opposition parties continue to gain national and EU power their aversions for war will be part of their very vocal opposition.
Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, regarding Ukraine and Russia said, “Our message is: No New Cold War in Europe!”
Nigel Farage caused an uproar when he said that the EU had,”blood on its hands over its imperialist expansionist policies towards Ukraine.”
These kinds of statements will become a European mantra. This is very bad for the success of the empire. America is stone broke. Except for multiple financial crimes against humanity it would have no money for war. These financial war crimes are rampant across the EU and within the EU parliament. Replenishing the coffers and troop build-ups of NATO will not likely continue. This will leave America only its own people to pillage for a few shekels more for war.
Let’s now strip the veneer of political correctness regarding the EU vote and translate it for all to hear far and wide. The people are “mad as hell.” They are not going to take it anymore. No more austerity. No more war!
Mr. Cameron. Mr. Holland. Mr. Kerry. You had better be listening. That sound you ignore coming from Brussels…. Its a train! …
Brett Redmayne-Titley spent his formative years with his family in Queensland, Australia, Ghana, West Africa, and the Bahamas. Visiting over fifty counties over four decades he has seen the world slowly destroyed by greed, capitalism and empire.
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A New Era Of Mass Armies Approaches
BY IAN WELSH | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
The army, or a part of it at the war college, has perked up and noticed some of the lessons of the Ukraine war, and that it’s a war that the US military could not fight. They’ve missed a lot of things, or felt they couldn’t/shouldn’t write about them, but they’ve figured some stuff out and written about them in a new report, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force” by Lieutenant Colonel Katie Crombe, and Professor John A. Nagle.
The entire thing is worth reading, but I’m going to pull out three of the main points. The first is that a volunteer US military can’t fight a real war.
The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties.11 Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks. (emphasis mine)
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- No Tricks Zone
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- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
- Greenland Petermann Glacier Has Grown 30 Kilometers Since 2012!
- New Study: Temperature-Driven CO2 Outgassing Explains 83 Percent Of CO2 Rise Since 1959
- Climate Extremists Ordered By Hamburg Court To Pay €400,000 In Damages
- More Evidence NE China Is Not Cooperating With The Alarmist Global Warming Narrative
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